An experimental investigation of software diversity in a fault-tolerant avionics application

Highly reliable and effective failure detection and isolation (FDI) software is crucial in modern avionics systems that tolerate hardware failures in real time. The FDI function is an excellent opportunity for applying the principal of software design diversity to the fullest, i.e., algorithm diversity, in order to provide gains in functional performance as well as potentially enhancing the reliability of the software. The authors examine algorithm diversity applied to the redundancy management software for a hardware fault-tolerant sensor array. Results of an experiment are presented that show the performance gains that can be provided by utilizing the consensus of three diverse algorithms for sensor FDI